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SPOILERS

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The Dark Knight Rises is the third and final installment in Christopher Nolan's Batman saga and is a sequel to Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008).

Reprising their roles from the first two films are Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman alongside newcomers Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy as two villains from the Batman mythology.

PREMISE

Following the death of District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman assumes responsibility for Dent's crimes to protect Dent's reputation and is subsequently hunted by the Gotham City Police Department. Eight years after the events depicted in The Dark Knight, Batman resurfaces in Gotham City, where he must discover the truth regarding the mysterious Selina Kyle and stop the villain Bane's plans to destroy the city.

A Tale of Two Cities is critical of both the revolutionaries as well as the regime which preceded it. Nolan is doing the same thing.

In the language of the film, the law and police have devolved into "shackles" on a free society, monitoring and subjugating it in a way that denies justice and due process to citizens who are forced into a life of crime in order to survive. The kangaroo courts of the revolutionaries are obviously unjust, but so are the official courts which preceded them -- the same madman controls the sentencing in both.

So the revelation that the Dent law is "based on a lie" is very much intended as a condemnation of the lack of fairness and justice in the system, as is the opening sequence which shows us an illegal CIA rendition in which bound victims are threatened with death without any due process.

The significance of the ending on the political level is that the police and the protestors destroy each other, leaving the city and its citizens with a "clean slate" to rebuild as winter fades into spring. And while the revolution destroys itself, the inequalities created by the entrenchment of wealth and privilege of the old society are also removed, as with the scenes of orphans moving into both Wayne Manor and the cave below it.